As an Operation Research engineer/PhD student, I was very interested to
discover that Google just released a project in my field. It is simply
called "or-tools" and contains a constraint programming solver.

While CP is not my primary field of study, I know the basics and I gave a
quick look, just in order to know how big it was and what I would fine
inside. Technically, I liked what I saw: What is actually inside is C++,
wrapped in a swig interface. There are 58 C++ files (24 of them are
headers) and a total number of 35998 lines of code, which is reasonable (=
rather big, but still readable by 1/2 persons) for a project in this
language. Embedding C++ in script languages is probably the best way I
know to get the best of the two worlds since you get the power of scripts,
and the speed of C++. While this technique is very efficient and more and
more projects are using it, Operations Research is a field where things
are usually moving slowly in terms of technology, so I was glad to see
that google engineers are doing it, it might show the way for the rest of
the community.

The project is supposed to build on the 3 major platforms. For linux, it
just uses a simple Makefile, which I liked even more: Having used
autotools a lot, I think I can now say I only have pure hate for them
(they never made things simpler) and I just want to hug every programmers
that are handling things with simple Makefiles.

There are examples in python and in C++ that are classic CP
exercises for students (at least I already knew most of them). The
only thing I did not like was the fact they are using subversion. I
find it easier to hack in projects when they are distributed with
DCVS. But I guess the guys who did this don't need my opinion,
since it is not the first time they are writing code. I was curious
and googled the name of the commiter: apparently he's a former
engineer from ilog (now part of IBM), which is famous in the OR
field for cplex, the famous MIP solver.